


Fallen

by alpacasandravens



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Angst, Fluff and Angst, M/M, fallen angel jonathan, human jervis, there will be romance...later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-10-20 08:56:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20672690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Jonathan's duty is to instill the fear of God into wayward humans, but when he forgets God to make them afraid of him, he is thrown out of Heaven. As if it isn't bad enough that he has now become a human, he has to deal with Jervis, who, he thinks, is probably the most annoying person on earth.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is mine and @gaymien66's au!! I wrote part of this a while ago, but the fic itself isn't done, so I'm posting what I have in an attempt to make me finish writing it. Anyway, enjoy!

When Jonathan watched the creation, he was excited. Ever since the Beginning, he had known his purpose - he was to spread the fear of God when the humans forgot. But knowing his purpose hadn’t helped in the interminable millennia before the humans were Created. To put it simply, he’d been bored.

So when he, and the rest of the angels, peered over God’s shoulder as they spun the first strands that would form the Earth, he looked forward to the future. He respected God, looked up to them as he should to the most powerful being in the universe. And he would make the humans, whatever they might be, respect them too.

God said the angels were supposed to love the humans, to treat them as God’s favorite creation, and Jonathan was confused. He didn’t understand why the humans were better than the angels, how he was supposed to make them fear God if they were going to be better than him. If he was weaker, how could he terrify them?

And then he understood. He saw the humans in their Garden, naked and ignorant, and for the first time he felt angry. 

Jonathan wasn’t the only one who was angry, not by a long shot. Lucifer began what would be the first preaching, except he preached anger, doubt. Other angels saw the weak humans and they were drawn to him. Why were they supposed to bow to beings of ignorance, powerless, who couldn’t even do something as simple as change their form. 

Cockroaches hadn’t been created yet, but if they had, Jonathan would have compared the two species.

When the time came, Jonathan stood with God against Lucifer. He agreed with Lucifer, that the angels should not be second to the humans, that God had probably messed up on that one. But he loved God, and he would not go against them. Above all, Jonathan was loyal.

So he watched half the heavenly host tumble screaming out of heaven, wings burning and terrible screams filling the air. He did not see them hit the bottom.

He never regretted his decision. For millennia, Jonathan followed the humans’ progress, watched them scramble out of the garden and build their own cities. Watched them forget God, time and again.

He knew he shouldn’t love when they forgot God. But that was when he got to fulfil his purpose, and there was nothing he loved more than that. So he pretended he didn’t wait eagerly for the humans to stray, hope they began to worship their idols. And when they inevitably did, he was ready.

Jonathan descended from the heavens, making himself as fearsome as possible. He was as tall as a mountain, yet somehow small enough to walk among the humans. When he decided to take a humanlike form, his wings sprouted from his back, huge and white. At first, they gleamed, the light of the purity of God shining through. But the more times he returned to Earth, the dirtier they became. 

He never killed, not directly. That wasn’t his task. But, when terrified, humans were known to kill themselves and each other. He’d caused riots big enough to topple cities just from the panic his presence brought. And so each visit to Earth meant more blood shed (all necessary to remind the humans of their Creator, of course), and Jonathan didn’t clean that blood from his wings. It dried there, crusting red over the white. Dirt and dust accumulated as well, caking them into a grimy brown. 

His favorite feeling was walking among a city of terrified infidels, breathing in their fear and newly created respect for God, wings dripping in their freshly spilt blood.

It has often been said that there is a thin line between love and hate. Jonathan, as an angel, was only supposed to feel love. His love for all creatures was, in theory, infinite, as was, supposedly, his capacity for forgiveness. 

He hadn’t been supposed to feel anger at the Creation, and yet he had, but he hid it well, and if God suspected he no longer loved as they had made him to, they never said. 

Angels, as beings of love, cannot feel hate. But somewhere after touching down on Earth for the first time in Mesopotamia but well before that self-proclaimed Savior had died, Jonathan’s feelings for the humans tipped definitively into hate. (If God had sent down a Savior, no one had told him. Possibly because that would mean that fear hadn’t been enough to keep them in line, but possibly it had simply been an oversight.) 

That’s not to say that he didn’t love anything about them. He adored the way they made him feel when he brought the fear of God onto them - though it had long since stopped being about God. He wanted the humans to fear _him_. 

He wanted to be loyal to God. If there was anything he still loved, it was God. But the feeling of hundreds, then thousands, and eventually millions of souls cowering before him was intoxicating, and he let it sweep him away. As time went on, humans became better at killing each other, strayed further from God even as they professed to grow closer to them. Jonathan’s wings, now almost heavy from the layers of blood and dirt, bore sparks of metal too - swords, tarnished and knotted into impossible shapes. Arrowheads so sharp they gleamed. A glittering silver fuse, detached from the explosives it had once armed.

Jonathan was no longer a creature of love. He was not a warrior angel, or an angel of death. Those had never been his functions, and though he loved both war and death, he did not love them for their own sake. He became a creature of fear. He changed his form into whatever would terrify the most people, and he walked among the destruction, reveling in the smell of the purest fear. God was long gone from his work.

Of course, God found out. They weren’t the best at the omniscience thing since they’d decided to leave Heaven, but they were far from oblivious. They looked at Jonathan, slathered in the destruction he’d created. They saw into his heart, saw the hatred for those little creatures. So weak. So easily scared. They saw no remorse, for it had long since burned out of him. They saw only the scraps of his loyalty.

So God did the only thing they could do. And Jonathan fell, screaming and burning into the endless pit as he’d seen Lucifer and his hordes do so many millennia ago. 

**

It is the end of summer, and a shooting star falls from the sky. 

The next day, scientists will ignore it or claim it is a meteorite. Satellites had not detected a meteorite of such a large size entering the atmosphere. Newspapers, if they are reputable, might comment on the meteorite, and if they are not, will almost certainly theorize about aliens. 

In the time of its descent, the shooting star is bright enough to be seen, not just for miles around, but for hundreds of miles. In Gotham, it is not quite bright enough to outshine the searchlight sitting on the roof of the GCPD, the one that won’t be touched until the city’s darkest nights. But it far surpasses the brightest star in the sky.

As it falls, it burns brighter, growing larger and larger until those who said it must be a plane are forced to rethink their opinions. And then it is gone, landed or burnt up or fallen to pieces. 

Jervis Tetch looks out a window in Gotham. He, like so many others, sees the star that is bright enough to burn through the perpetual haze, close enough to not disrupt the city’s never-ending cloud cover.

He knows it is not a star. It is not a meteorite, or a piece of falling space junk. If anything, the alien theorists would be closest, but he knows it is not that either. Jervis looks out the window and he sees someone - something - falling, and it reminds him of how he had fallen so long ago.

Granted, Jervis’s mind was less than clear, and his fall had been much more metaphorical than literal. But when he saw that star, something clicked in the convoluted passageways of his brain. This, he knew, was important. Far more important than his petty revenge plans for Jim Gordon, even if a moment ago he had thought them the most important things in the universe.

Jervis had never been one for religion. He would never ascribe his actions to a ‘higher power’ or ‘greater purpose’ - his Wonderland logic was the only ruling principle in his life. But there is something happening here, and he knows it.

He has to find whatever fell from the sky. He knows this with the same certainty that tells him he is alive. And he’s had plenty of practice finding things, after all those years spent searching for Alice.   
The star has barely blinked out in the sky before he has abandoned his plans, his hideout, his underlings. If someone had asked him why he was doing this, he would have probably killed them. If he deigned to give an answer, he might have said, no matter how little sense it made, even to himself, that when he watched that star fall, he recognized a kindred spirit.


	2. Chapter 2

Jonathan didn’t wake up in Hell. 

He fell and he burned and he fell some more. Heaven receded above him, though he couldn’t see it over the smoke. He didn’t know how long he fell, but it seemed like forever, millennia at least. 

He knew what had happened to Lucifer and his cohort. They’d fallen down into a dark realm created especially for them. Hell. A perfect perversion of Heaven, a place for evil to fester and ripen. 

These demons had walked Earth on occasion, and Jonathan had more than once come into contact with them. Their rebellion didn’t seem to have bettered their lives - even when professing to enjoy their works of evil, there was a misery that hid just behind their eyes. Jonathan had been glad he hadn’t fallen.

But now he was falling, and he would be a demon. The thought of being evil didn’t bother him. He already was.

What stuck with him was the way the demons’ happiness seemed to have been drained from them. He’d truly delighted in what he’d done, unlike their pale imitation of pleasure. Perhaps joy was only a Heavenly trait.

So while he felt pity for the demons, he didn’t hate them. After all, he had agreed with them, once upon a time, and on some level he still did. He hated the humans. 

So though Jonathan didn’t wake up in Hell, in his opinion, he might as well have.

Even before he opened his eyes, Jonathan felt… weird. He’d never felt pain before, never been corporeal enough to, but now he hurt. His soul hurt. He could feel it crying out at its separation from Heaven, from the light that had previously fed it. 

Something else hurt, too. He opened his eyes (and he’d never had to do that, open his eyes, because before he’d never had to close them) and saw the sky above him, so dark blue it was nearly black and filled with so many stars. Near the horizon, a bloom of yellow light blotted them out, causing their light to fade into the background and become invisible. 

They looked strangely familiar, though he could not have said why.

Jonathan stared at the stars in the sky and thought he should have been more careful. God should never have found out about what was in his heart, because he should have been better at hiding it. But all that time on Earth, witnessing all that terror, and he’d gotten careless.

Strangely, the backs of Jonathan’s eyes hurt. He ignored it to stare at the pinpricks of light above him and pretend they were Heaven shining through. The stars began to swim in front of his eyes, and he blinked furiously to clear his vision.

He’d never blinked before.

A cold wind blew, rustling the leaves of the corn plants around him. The ones in his immediate vicinity had been flattened, pressed to the ground in a perfect circle, but the rest were still standing, blocking everything but the ground and the sky. Jonathan didn’t think they had cornfields in Hell.

He shivered as the wind blew again, stronger this time, whistling around him and stealing his warmth. Before, Jonathan had never known what cold felt like.

Jonathan looked down at himself, though he already suspected what he would see. A deep feeling of dread crept over him as his suspicions were confirmed. A human body.

Hesitantly, he poked and pinched the skin of his arms and chest, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t truly exist. He didn’t want to be trapped in the same fleshy form as a human. He was better than that. No matter how much he hated it, his body was solid. It was warm to the touch, though he still felt cold, and the corn on the ground made a crackling sound when he took a step and he could feel his eyes burn again as he started to cry. 

Silent, frustrated tears rolled, and he didn’t care to stop them. 

Jonathan collapsed to the ground and pulled his knees up to his chest. He was still cold, so cold, and the feeling of the flattened corn beneath him was unpleasant. He didn’t want to be feeling anything at all. 

He crossed his arms and dug his fingers into his skin hard enough that it hurt. The tears that still fell down his face, harder and thicker now than ever, were warm, but they were only another sign of his weakness. God was, above all things, wise. They knew just how to punish him, and they knew how much he would have rather been a demon - or an angel, or even dead - than be one of these pathetic creatures. 

Jonathan drew his wings around himself in an attempt to block out the wind. He still had wings, of that he was sure; he could feel them attached to his back, heavy but strong. But when he curled them around his legs, the muscles all along his wings cried out in agony. 

What few feathers remained were pitch black. Where they rested against his legs, it appeared almost as though the night had extended itself to cover him, the dark leaving streaks of ash and blood along his skin. 

He was dirty from the fall; he knew that. It wasn’t possible to fall through most of the known universe while on fire and end up clean. But his wings were mutilated. Scorched black feathers littered the ground around him, and the muscles of his wings bled a thick, brownish blood. Human blood. It dripped down his wings and stung them.

No matter how hard he gripped his arms (and he dug his fingers in deep enough that the long nails cut his skin and more of that human blood oozed out), his wings hurt more. He felt like he was still on fire, and he could have believed he was, if everything wasn’t so cold. 

Jonathan squeezed his eyes shut and let himself cry.

He didn’t know how long he sat there when he heard the crunch of the ground that told him he wasn’t alone. It was still dark, so it couldn’t have been that long. Maybe it could have been. Jonathan didn’t know how time worked on Earth, as it was so very different in Heaven. 

His eyes had almost crusted shut from the crying, but Jonathan lifted his head and gave the intruder his very best glare. The one that, when he had been an angel, had been enough to send men running away screaming.

It did not scare the intruder.

As it got closer, Jonathan could see that the intruder was a human. Of course it was; what else would it be on Earth? Something in Jonathan’s chest hurt from how badly he wanted to smite this creature and how much he knew it wasn’t possible.

The intruder appeared to be male, or at least he was dressed in a style very similar to the men Jonathan had fond memories of terrifying a hundred or so years ago as they took their picnics to watch the wars. That hadn’t been too far from here, Jonathan thought, though he didn’t know how he knew that. He also knew that if he stood up he would be considerably taller than this man, though he didn’t think he was especially tall. He missed being tall, able to grow to the size of a mountain and send his voice booming into a terrified city below him.

“Hello!” The man said hesitantly. “Perhaps you can assist me. I am here to try to find something that fell from the sky.”

“Go away.”

The man’s nose wrinkled and he drew his eyebrows together. “Was it you? You appear to be in a bit of a state.”

“Get out!” Jonathan yelled.

The words didn’t echo around the fields, bouncing off impossible corners of the sky. They weren’t louder than possibility, and they didn’t inspire fear. His voice cracked. It was scratchy and higher than it should be and not intimidating in the slightest. He thought he’d heard this exact cry from the humans, just before he’d watched their deaths.

It was pathetic.

“I can’t just leave you here when you are so clearly distressed. That wouldn’t be polite!”

Jonathan was about to say he didn’t give a rat’s ass about politeness and that he wanted to be left alone when the man continued speaking. 

“My name is Jervis Tetch. Can I help you?”

He sounded so sincere that Jonathan found himself reluctant to yell any more. Besides, it was embarrassing when his voice cracked.

“Why do you care,” he asked petulantly.

The man - Jonathan refused to think of him as Jervis, because if he had a name that meant he was someone, as opposed to some kind of ant Jonathan was used to crushing - appeared puzzled for a second, before saying “I feel compelled to find whatever fell from the sky. And you feel important, so I want to help you.”

Jonathan sighed. “If you’re going to kill me, get on with it.”

“No no no! I would never!” He hesitated for a second, in which Jonathan realized that given the circumstances, he absolutely would. He’d probably killed before. “As I said - I’m here to help.”

Jonathan narrowed his eyes at him in what was meant to convey a clear expression of disbelief, but before that got across, a gust of wind blew over him, and he instinctively closed his eyes as he shivered.

“Oh dear. Are you cold? Here-” The man handed Jonathan his own coat, a formal suit jacket that Jonathan was absolutely sure would be both uncomfortable and far too small for him. 

“I’m not wearing that.” It was too human. Besides, he wasn’t about to be accepting help from one of them - he should be better than that.

A flash of confusion and an emotion Jonathan hesitated to call hurt flashed across the man’s face. Good.

“I should hardly think you’re in a state to pick and choose your attire,” the man said. “But if you insist.”

An awkward silence descended, the man waiting expectantly, though for what Jonathan didn’t know, and rocking slightly on the balls of his feet , Jonathan pulling what he had left of his wings even closer around him for warmth and trying not to wince at the pain. After what seemed like an eternity, he gave in.

“Is there anything else I can wear?”

Jervis looked at him differently, in surprise and with an uncomfortable interest behind his eyes. It was as though he had just now realized that Jonathan was not wearing any clothes. It wasn’t as though the wings really covered much in this state.

Jonathan glared at him. “I hope you’re looking at the wings,” he said with a tone of voice implying he’d better be.

Jervis seemed to snap out of it, shaking his head slightly before nodding. “Of course! Are they always in such a state?”

“Yes, I set them on fire regularly to maintain the aesthetic.” Jonathan rolled his eyes. Of course the first human he met was an idiot. Then again, they all were. “No, you moron.”

“Do they hurt?”

“Why don’t I set you on fire and you can see how it feels.”

“Okay, okay! No need to be hasty!”

Jonathan shivered again, involuntarily. “Are there any damn clothes or am I going to freeze to death with you watching?”

“There’s not much out here, I’m afraid,” Jervis said apologetically.

Jonathan hated that usage of the word ‘afraid.’ Bearing bad news wasn’t a true fear, not something that should send the humans running to take cover, screaming and crying and dying. Fear was so diluted, nowadays.

“Fine. I’ll find something myself.” 

He stood up, wings creaking as they stretched out behind him. Another feather fell off, and he felt it drop. Jervis immediately and obviously averted his eyes, refusing to look in Jonathan’s general direction. Jonathan marched out of the clearing toward the edge of the field, and Jervis followed behind him. Though he could not tell if Jervis’s eyes ever fell on him (and he hoped they didn’t), Jonathan’s skin felt too small and almost shameful. He’d always judged Adam and Eve harshly for running out of the Garden, covering themselves in plants. Degrading, he’d thought. But now, he was grateful for the cover of the corn pressing in around him. He wanted clothes, and he was embarrassed by how extremely un-angelic this whole situation was.

In the center of a small clearing in the corn, Jonathan found a straw creature, human clothes impaled on sticks and stuffed with hay that poked out from every seam. He stole the shirt, extending the tears in the back to accommodate his wings. They stung where they brushed against the fabric as he put it on, but he pushed through. 

The pants were beyond hope, barely more than a collection of holes. But the shirt was, at least, something. It was large and plaid and fell far enough down on his thighs that he felt less exposed. It was almost fitting, he thought, that he’d stolen it from that strange mockery of a man. After all, isn’t that what he was too?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey! so i still have an outline for the rest of this fic, but i've been really busy and haven't worked on this in a solid month. honestly posting to try and get some inspiration back lmao. anyway hope you enjoyed this chapter, and kudos/comments will definitely make me write the next chapter faster!!!

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed, drop kudos/a comment below! Comments feed my soul and might make me write faster. Thanks for reading!


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